As Andy Burnham prepares to become Britain’s next prime minister on Monday, more than a century after Labour first formed a government, the party still cannot claim what its Conservative rivals have delivered three times over: a female leader.
That gap, once treated as an awkward footnote, has become one of the loudest questions swirling around Westminster this summer.
More than 125 years after its founding and over a century since it first entered government, the Labour Party is on the verge of installing its latest leader, and once again, it will be a man. Andy Burnham’s near-uncontested rise to the top of the party has revived a question that has dogged Labour for decades: how can Britain’s self-declared party of equality, which counts more women MPs than every other party in Parliament combined, have never once elected a woman to lead it, while the Conservative Party has produced three female prime ministers in Margaret Thatcher, Theresa May and Liz Truss?
The Question Resurfaces At The Worst Possible Moment
The debate reignited in May, when Jess Phillips, the Labour MP for Birmingham Yardley who had just resigned as minister for safeguarding and violence against women and girls, told an audience at the Hay Festival that her own party was, in her words, “a bit sexist, innit.”
She went further, arguing that “every institution that every single person in this room works for is led by the patriarchy,” while also cautioning against a simplistic reading of what a female leader would actually deliver. “I have to say, the idea that a woman leads and it makes it better for women is not one that I’ve recognised in this country,” Phillips said, pointedly invoking her own experience under Liz Truss’s brief and turbulent premiership: “My mortgage went up by a thousand pounds a month, cheers Liz. I shouted at her, every time I saw her, the amount that she now owed me. She has not paid me back.”
Phillips’s remarks landed amid a chaotic stretch for the party, as speculation mounted over whether Andy Burnham, then still outside Parliament, could mount a serious challenge to Keir Starmer’s leadership. Sky News presenter Trevor Phillips pressed the issue directly to Work and Pensions Secretary Pat McFadden, asking bluntly what was “wrong” with a party that, even amid open talk of a leadership contest, was not seriously entertaining a female challenger.
McFadden’s response leaned on the bench strength argument that has been offered by Labour figures for years. “The Labour Party’s not perfect, like any other organisation,” he said.
“There are wonderful women politicians in the Labour Party, many of them are capable of leadership, and if we ever are in a position of a contest, why wouldn’t they put themselves forward?” In the event, senior women including former deputy prime minister Angela Rayner did not enter the race, and Burnham’s rapid consolidation of support from Labour MPs made the contest a foregone conclusion before it properly began.
A Pattern That Predates This Summer
The current moment is only the latest chapter in a considerably longer story. Labour has, on three occasions, been led on an interim basis by a woman, Margaret Beckett briefly in 1994 after the death of John Smith, and Harriet Harman twice, first in 2010 following Gordon Brown’s resignation and again in 2015 after Ed Miliband’s defeat, but never by a woman elected to the role outright.
Harman, the longest continuously serving female MP in the Commons before her retirement, has spent years pressing the point publicly, at one stage arguing that Labour’s next leadership contest ought to be fought exclusively between women, with male MPs “actively” backing female candidates rather than merely stepping aside.
“There are lots of fantastic men in the Labour Party who would be more than capable of being leader,” Harman said at the time. “And there are also lots of women who are more than capable of being leader, and we’re going to choose one of the women. The men can jostle amongst themselves to be deputy.”
She later described the imbalance as “downright embarrassing,” noting that the Conservatives had by then produced two female leaders while Labour had “not even had a woman leader in opposition, let alone a woman prime minister.”
Harman has offered her own theory for why the pattern persists, rooted in the different ways the two parties’ women have approached power. Labour women, she has argued, have tended to challenge the party’s internal structures rather than simply seek to rise within them, campaigning for guaranteed shortlists and shadow cabinet seats for women in ways that provoked resentment from male colleagues who felt sidelined.
Conservative trailblazers such as Thatcher, by contrast, succeeded largely by working within existing party hierarchies rather than trying to rewrite them.
“She wasn’t saying it’s been a party of men, I’m going to make it a party where women and men share power on equal terms,” Harman has said of Thatcher’s rise. “She was about succeeding within the party power structure as it was, about beating the men at their own game, on their terms.” That distinction, Harman suggests, has left Labour women more likely to be cast as internal critics than as leadership contenders, even as the party has consistently elected far more women to Parliament than the Conservatives ever have.
Contenders Who Came Close, But Not Close Enough
The list of women who have run for the Labour leadership and lost is not short. Diane Abbott stood in 2010, becoming the first Black woman to contest a major British party’s leadership, finishing last among five candidates as Ed Miliband ultimately prevailed. Angela Eagle challenged Jeremy Corbyn directly in 2016 following a no-confidence vote among Labour MPs, launching her campaign by declaring, “I’m not a Blairite, I’m not a Brownite, and I’m not a Corbynista. I am my own woman, a strong Labour woman,” only to withdraw before the ballot in favour of a single challenger, Owen Smith.
Yvette Cooper ran in both 2010 and 2015, reaching the final round in the latter contest before losing decisively to Corbyn. Each case has fed the same underlying critique: that Labour women have repeatedly been present at the starting line of leadership contests without ever crossing the finish line first.
What Burnham’s Women MPs Are Now Demanding
With Burnham’s ascension all but assured, attention among Labour’s female MPs has shifted from contesting the leadership to shaping what comes next inside it. Phillips has called on the incoming prime minister to ensure that at least half of his ministerial appointments go to women once he enters Downing Street, arguing there is “plenty of talent” to draw from.
“Equality is absolutely in the blood of the Labour Party,” Phillips said, pointing to what she described as a longstanding, if inconsistently honoured, commitment to gender-balanced representation in government. But she was equally insistent that visibility alone was not the goal. “We’re over half the talent,” she said, arguing that women need not simply be included in Burnham’s top team but should hold genuine positions of power and decision-making within it, rather than symbolic seats around the cabinet table.
A Reckoning Still Deferred
For all the attention the debate has drawn this summer, Labour’s leadership question has, once again, resolved itself in favour of a man, and with remarkably little contest at all.
Whether that outcome reflects a deeper structural resistance within the party, a shortage of women willing to withstand the bruising scrutiny of a leadership run, or simply the circumstantial mathematics of a contest Burnham had effectively already won before it started, remains sharply disputed even among Labour’s own MPs.
What is not disputed is the historical record: a century after first taking power, and with three Conservative women having already occupied Downing Street, the Labour Party is once again handing its top job to a man, leaving its own oft-repeated question of when a woman will finally lead it unanswered for at least one more electoral cycle.
